A Colonial Affair: Commerce, Conversion, and Scandal in French India

by Danna Agmon

Danna Agmon's gripping microhistory is a vivid guide to the "Nayiniyappa Affair" in the French colony of Pondicherry, India. The surprising and shifting fates of Nayiniyappa and his family form the basis of this story of global mobilization, which is replete with merchants, missionaries, local brokers, government administrators, and even the French royal family.

Agmon's compelling account draws readers into the social, economic, religious, and political interactions that defined the European colonial experience in India and elsewhere. Her portrayal of imperial sovereignty in France's colonies as it played out in the life of one beleaguered family allows readers to witness interactions between colonial officials and locals.

Thanks to generous funding from Virginia Tech and its participation in TOME, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

Genres: History, India, France

236 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 15, 2017

Reviews

[Shane · Rating 3 out of 5]

French Colonial India Exposed

A criminal case in Pondicherry that exposed the unsavoury fabric of French colonialism in India and which reads more like a socio-political treatise than the story of a wrongly-accused man whose redemption came only to his progeny.

Nayiniyappa, chief broker of Pondicherry, suddenly falls out of favour with Héberts, the governor, (who had also fallen out of favour once before but had done a deal with the all-powerful Jesuits to return to power) and is arrested on a trumped up charge of sedition, faces a kangaroo court, is sentenced to be lashed in the public marketplace, and then imprisoned with all his assets confiscated. His persecution continues in prison, and Nayinyappa suddenly dies a few months into his sentence, under mysterious circumstances. Restitution comes posthumously, when his son Guruvappa, goes to France, becomes a Catholic, and accepts a knighthood. The King of France pardons Nayiniyappa, sends Guruvappa back as the new broker for Pondicherry and orders Héberts to pay restitution. Thus ends the crime story, what is left for the rest of this rather repetitious story is to view this case from various socio-political angles.

We get a view into the history of Pondicherry, its legal and political make up, its composition of French and Indian populations and their relative circumstances, its cosmopolitan nature as a relatively peaceful centre of trade while neighbouring Indian states were constantly at war, its languages (Portuguese was the lingua franca in Pondicherry in the early 18th century when this story takes place, despite being a French colony for over 150 years at that point), and its rival Catholic factions – the Jesuits, Capuchins, and MEP missionaries and their political hefts. The book’s central argument is that commerce and conversion to Catholicism in French India were both equally important and deemed necessary by the French King, and therefore were simultaneously symbiotic and fundamentally in tension with one another. And Nayiniyappa, although a successful businessman and furthering French interests in commerce, was a Hindu who refused to convert, and therefore got himself squarely in the crosshairs of the Jesuits.

The role of the broker as an intermediary between colonial master and indigenous merchants is dissected at length. This individual garnered immense prestige and privilege from all quarters, and amassed huge wealth as a result. Nayiniyappa, in this role, was a rich and powerful man who was able to mobilize merchants from his home of Madras and other parts of India to come to Pondicherry and thereby spread their tentacles into most trading ports and networks around the world. Consequently, rival local families competed for this position, and in this tale we see the battle between the Pulle family (Nayiniyappa) and the Mudali family constantly ousting one another based on their fortunes that rose and fell interchangeably with the French colonial administration.

This is a good book to understand colonial French India, it is not much of a true crime story

[Grady · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is solid in its historical research, but a real lost opportunity in structure. The underlying story - of a Tamil merchant and intermediary who rises in the French colony, is undermined by the French governer and the Jesuits, dies in prison, but then has his reputation and family rehabilitated when his eldest son travels to Paris to petition the authorities - has drama, pathos, and interesting characters. But rather than tell this as a multi-layered narrative, Agmon treats the layers of the story one by one as analytical chapters: “I resist a chronological narrative of the affair, instead opting for a prismatic history, returning to the same details and events in each chapter, slightly shifting the analytic lens in each one to go over the same narrative material.”[at 16]. That choice sacrifices a lot of narrative power, most notably the option of using empathy to bring the reader into a deeper intuitive understanding of what lives in another era were like.

One reason an historian might coose to use a subject-by-subject analytical approach is that, if they have already published chunks of analysis as individual papers or journal articles, it’s easier just to aggregate them rather than taking the time (and perhaps having to do additional research) to blend them into a robust narrative. Presumably, also, keeping related but distinct topics separate is sometimes necessary to keep especially nuanced points from getting lost. But this author’s points aren’t that nuanced; in fact they are pretty obvious: “The book’s central argument is that commerce and conversion in French India were simultaneously symbiotic and fundamentally in tension with one another.” [at 2]; or “Distributed and delegated authority, I have argued, was the hallmark of the early decades of French presence in India.”[at 164].

One of the more problematic statements, repeated in a few places, is that “the Nayiniyappa controversy provided the involved actors an opportunity to consider and argue for different visions of France and its empire.”[at 166] But I don’t think the author actually means different visions; this seems like a place where academic jargon has overcome her prose. Agmon doesn’t present evidence that the actors held different ideological visions of ‘France’ or its empire, rather that their interests and modes of interacting locally in Paris were different and often in conflict. The book doesn’t argue that a different outcome in the fight between Governor Hebert and Nayiniyappa‘s family would have led to any meaningful functional differences in the French colony from 1720 on - this seems mostly a question of which family of local intermediaries would be ascendant, not a choice between distinct futures. In the event, control still slipped back and forth between the families for years.

Critque of the structure aside, the story itself is interesting, and the author has done extensive research, not just to piece details of the story together, but to explore how religious conversion, trade, colonial society, and the French legal system worked at the time. Agmon also provides running observations on the ways fads in historiography have elevated or obscured aspects of the affair. The raw material for a strong narrative is all here, and this is worth skimming for folks interested in Indian, French colonial, or global history in the 1700s.